Social media and the always-connected digital life really are undermining our relationships. Carl Marci shows that our phone and Facebook habits aren't just distractions; they're altering our brains, harming our ability to communicate intimately. Fortunately, there are ways out. More than a critic, Marci offers solutions for tech-life balance.

How can we re-create the ceremony as it was celebrated in Rome? How can we piece together its elusive traces in art and literature? This work addresses these questions, focusing on the intriguing process of sifting through and making sense of what constitutes 'history'.

Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor provide a clearly reasoned, articulate account of the two main principles of secularism--equal respect, and freedom of conscience--and argue that in our religiously diverse, politically interconnected world, secularism, properly understood, may offer the only path to religious and philosophical freedom.

Umberto Eco explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. With a series of examples, ranging from fairy tales to Mickey Spillane, Eco draws his readers in by making them collaborators in the creation of text, and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.

Mark Edmundson finds in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself the evolution of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Breaking from the past literature he saw as "feudal"-obsessed with the noble and great-Whitman created a story of commonplace egalitarian selfhood, a story he lived as a hospital volunteer during the Civil War.

Esteemed scholar, poet, and critic Stephanie Burt anthologizes five decades of verse for and by queer Americans. Interpreted by Burt, the poems of Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, and others trace a flourishing of queer life from Stonewall to today.

Jennifer Allen details a German utopian movement that arose against capitalist triumphalism at the end of the Cold War. Describing public art and history projects, alongside novel community-centered political institutions, Allen shows how activists invited ordinary people to build a radically new society free from alienation and disenfranchisement.

Tata is one of the world's most diversified companies, selling everything from salt to software. Mircea Raianu charts Tata's 150-year trajectory, through the eras of imperial free trade, protectionist nationalism, and market liberalization and asks what the future has in store for India's leading brand and for capitalism writ large.